Physically, she was terribly prostrated; but spiritually, feeding on those stumbling words, she rejoiced like a strong man to run a race! She saw no confession in the fact that everybody was astonished at what she had done; she was astonished herself. "I wasn't afraid!" she said, wonderingly.
"It was because you liked Maurice more than you were scared," Edith said; she offered this explanation the day that Maurice had been allowed to come across the hall, rather shakily, to adore his wife.
His first sight of her was a great shock. … The strain of that terrible night had blanched and withered her face; there were lines on her forehead that never left it.
Edith, sneaking in behind him, said under her breath: "Goodness! Don't she look old!"
She did. But as Maurice fell on his knees beside her, it seemed as if she drank youth from his lips. Under his kisses her worn face bloomed with joy.
"It was nothing—nothing," she insisted, stroking his thick hair with her trembling hand, and trying to silence his words of wondering worship.
"I was not worthy of it. … To think that you—" He hid his face on her shoulder.
Afterward, when he went back to his own room, she lay, smiling tranquilly to herself; her look was the look one sees on the face of a woman who, in that pallid hour after the supreme achievement of birth, has looked upon her child. She was entirely happy. From the open door of Maurice's room came, now and then, the murmur of Edith's honest little voice, or Maurice's chuckle. They were talking about her, she knew, and the happy color burned in her cheeks. When he came in for his second visit, late that afternoon, she asked him, archly, what he and Edith had been talking about so long in his room?
"I believe you were telling her what a goose I am about thunderstorms," she said.
"I was not!" he declared—and her eyes shone. But when she urged—
"Well, what were you talking about?" he couldn't remember anything but a silly story of Edith's hens. He repeated it, and Eleanor sighed; how could he be interested in anything so childish!
As it happened, he was not; he had scarcely listened to Edith. The only thing that interested Maurice now, was what Eleanor had done for him! Thinking of it, he brooded over her, silently, his cheek against hers, then Mrs. Houghton came in and banished him, saying that Eleanor must go to sleep; "and you and Edith must keep quiet!" she said.
He was so contrite that, tiptoeing to his own room, he told poor faithful Edith her voice was too loud: "You disturb Eleanor. So dry up, Skeezics!"
As he grew stronger, and was able to go downstairs, Edith felt freer to talk to him—for down on the porch, or out in the garden, her eager young voice would not reach those languid ears. Then, suddenly, all her chances to talk stopped: "What's the matter with Maurice?" she pondered, crossly; "he's backed out of helping me. Why can't he go on shingling the chicken coop?" For it was while this delightful work was under way that it, and "talk," came to an abrupt end.
The shingling, begun joyously by the big boy and the little girl on Monday, promised several delightfully busy mornings. … Of course the setting out for Mercer had been postponed; there was no possibility of moving Eleanor for the present; so Maurice's "business career," as he called it, with grinning pomposity, had to be delayed—Eleanor turned white at the mere suggestion of convalascing at Green Hill without him! Consequently Maurice, when not worshiping his wife, had nothing to do, and Edith had seized the opportunity to make him useful. … "We'll shingle my henhouse," she had announced. Maurice liked the scheme as much as she did. The September air, the smell of the fresh shingles, the sitting with one leg doubled under you, and the other outstretched on the hot slope of the roof, the tap-tapping of the hammers, the bossing of Edith, the trying to talk of Eleanor, and thunderstorms, while you hold eight nails between your lips; then the pause while Edith climbs down the ladder and runs to the kitchen for hot cookies; all these things would be a delightful occupation for any intelligent person!
"It'll take three mornings to do it," Edith said, importantly; and Maurice said:
"It will, because you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was well enough to do it," he said—and then burst into self-derisive chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare her stiff!"
It was after this talk that Maurice "backed out" on the job—but Edith never knew why. She saw no connection between the unfinished roof, and the fact that that same afternoon, sitting on the floor in the Bride's room, she had, in her anxiety to be entertaining, repeated Maurice's remark about the ridgepole. Eleanor, who had had an empty morning, listening to the distant tapping of hammers, had drooped a weary lip.
"I should hate it. Horrid, dirty work!"
"Oh no! It's nice, clean work," Edith corrected her.
"But you wouldn't like it, of course," she said, with satisfaction; "you'd be scared! You're scared of everything, Maurice says. You were scared to death, up on the mountain."
Eleanor was silent.
"He thinks it's lovely for you to be scared; it's funny about Maurice," said Edith, thoughtfully; "he doesn't like it when I'm scared—not that I ever am, now, but I used to be when I was a child."
The color flickered on Eleanor's cheeks: "Edith, I'll rest now," she said; her voice broke.
Edith looked at her, open-mouthed. "Why, Eleanor!" she said; "what's the matter? Are you mad at anything? Have you a stomachache? I'll run for mother!"
"There's nothing the matter. But—but I wish you'd tell Maurice to come and speak to me."
Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are you?"—then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you! Something's the matter, and—"
Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a time. …
And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.
Yet Maurice had not entirely "backed out." … The very next morning, before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone, done more than his share of the shingling.
"But, Maurice, why didn't you wake me?" Edith protested, when she discovered what he had done. "I'd have gone out, too!"
"I liked doing it by myself," Maurice evaded.
And for five minutes Edith was sulky again. "He puts on airs, 'cause he's married! Well, I don't care. He can shingle the whole roof by himself if he wants to! I don't like married men, anyhow."
The married man had, indeed, wanted to be by himself—to put the nails in his mouth, and to sit on the cold, slippery shingles in the gray September morning, and to tap-tap-tap—and think, and think.
But he didn't like his thoughts very well. …
He thought how he had rushed upstairs, terrified lest Eleanor was fainting or had a "stomachache," or something—and found her sitting up in bed, her cheeks red and glazed with tears, her round, full chin quivering. He thought how he had tried to make out what she was driving at about Edith, and the chicken coop, and the ridgepole!
"You told Edith I was scared!"
Maurice's bewilderment was full of stumbling questions: "Told Edith? When? What?"
And as she said "when" and "what," ending with, "You said I am scared!" Maurice could only say,